Fun, friendly JIR is a great escape from the harsh and the hassle. Benefits stretch far beyond the easy chair. Many items are perfect to post, or to show around, or to include in a presentation. Many spark new and interesting thoughts. Great gift for scientists, doctors, engineers, and professors. Subscribe

WILDWORDS board game!

All the fun that Scrabble® should have been. More words, more strategy, more bluffs, more twists! Great gift! Top-quality tiles and trays. Including US shipping: $36.95. eMail or snail-mail your order.

The stars above are beautiful, and so is The Stars Above starfinder!

Gleaming, sturdy blue acrylic, 14 inches wide. Dome-shaped, like the real sky. Dial up any time on any date. Find the constellations, the Milky Way, planets, and major stars. Great gift! Little distortion between 30° and 50° North latitude. $99.95 includes base, booklet, and UPS ground shipping within US. eMail or snail-mail your order.

Stretchable Graph Sheets!

JIR exclusive! JIR was first to suggest them, way back in 1964, and now makes them real. Our graph sheets stretch a point so much you could be a politician. [not recommended] Each kit contains these 8.5 x 11 inch sheets:

Stretchable Spandex grid

Invariant transparent grid to use atop:

Stretchable blank Spandex to draw your own curves on

Suggestions

Use your own clipboard and binder clips to anchor sides you don’t want to stretch. $9.95 including US postage. ß or snail-mail your order.

Brian Malow

Brian Malow performs widely on the comedy club circuit. He is a life-long fan of science and science fiction. His intelligent, imaginative comedy plays delightfully with language, and is spiced with a healthy dose of science. His clean, energetic style makes him a favorite at colleges and corporations (such as Apple, Dell, 3M, and Texas Instruments). www.sciencecomedian.com

Astronauts aboard space shuttle STS-44, while in orbit, listened to his Neil Armstrong routine. And they laughed.

Your group can laugh, too. A whole lot. eMail Brian Malow to arrange a performance for your own special event: brian@butseriously.com

Norm Goldblatt performs at nightclubs, comedy clubs, corporate events, private parties and fundraisers. His humor touches on technology, science, politics, and the human condition. Every show is different and peppered with jokes from the day’s news. His quips were quoted regularly by the late great Herb Caen in the San Francisco Chronicle and his jokes are heard on the Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Born with Asociotechnophilia, he redirected the ravaging effects of this disease toward developing skills as a physicist, teacher, engineer and entertainer. He has 2 head positions — towards the stars and towards his shoes — but get him onstage and power him with a spotlight, and his laser gaze will entrance you. www.normgoldblatt.com.

Anthology Recapitulates Hilarity:

This Book Warps
Space and Time

JIR’s anthology is a fast-paced frolic of humorous and quirky tidbits in science, math, academe, bureaucracy, and witty wordplay. More than 250 entries ponder and pun the practical and peculiar. Edited by JIR’s Norman Sperling, published by Andrews McMeel. 289 pages, 6 x 6 inches (but only the dimensions are square), soft cover. A great gift! custom-inscribed any way the customer wants, $15.99 including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order.

Contest:
The Funniest
Graph

The winner
isAll Theories Proven With
One Graph by Don Grace of Florence, Alabama. Click the picture
to see it in most of its glory. To get a copy professionally printed on
paper suitable for a magazine cover, backed by page after page of more
graphs and science humor, subscribe!

JIR is now the
biggest part of Everything in the Universe.

Hi! I'm Norm Sperling, the editor since 2004. I've subscribed to JIR since the 1970s. I was assistant
editor of Sky & Telescope magazine, and Science Editor of AltaVista.com.
I teach astronomy in universities around San Francisco, wrote the
book What Your Astronomy Textbook Won't Tell You, and
co-designed Edmund Scientific's Astroscan telescope.

Meet the Editor!
In Person At:

SiliCon, science fiction convention. Find JIR's table in "Science Alley". New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs, Bathsheba's math-art. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on!

Wonderfest, the Bay Area Festival of Science. November 1 at Stanford in Palo Alto; November 2 at the University of California in Berkeley. Find JIR in the Science Expo. Norm also chairs the 1 PM Saturday discussion, "Does Anything Happen at Random?". New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on!

San Diego Science Festival. Performing "Irreproducible Results from the Journal" as well as exhibiting. New and old JIRs, books, Spandex graphs. Bring your camera: we have a JIR front cover that you can take your picture on!

JIR Changes since 2004:

Articles from new authors.

Updated graphics.

Subscribing teachers may reprint for free one JIR article per semester for their students, if they cite the author's and publication's names, starting with vol. 50 #5.

A few ads. We really appreciate your tips on who
would be appropriate advertisers.

1-liner ads - 1 line, all the way across the page - for
just $39. 1-liners are a great way to tout a website or a
briefly-described product.

Guidelines for Authors

JIR is always pleased to receive
submissions. We can
accept them by snail-mail on paper, CD-ROM, or 3.5-inch
floppy, or by eMail to normsperling@gmail.com.

JIR articles should be humorous.
Appeal to
scientists, doctors, and engineers. Make your points in
good humor. Make readers feel good about having read them. Minimize
bitter aftertaste.

The rule for length is simple:
write it for what
it's worth. Include everything that ought to be there, and
then stop. Don't leave out anything that helps the
article, but don't pad, either.

Parts of articles that deal with
real science should
be valid both in technicalities and in sense of proportion. 70% of JIR
readers have doctorates - they can spot
problems.

Many readers don't enjoy slogging
through complex
equations in unfamiliar specialties, so use only as much
math as your points require.

Use the citation format
appropriate for the topic.

Please include appropriate
illustrations.

Each article is distinctive. Do
what makes your
article the best it can be. We look forward to reading
your submission.

Let us produce your publications

We get the science right - and the wording -
and the
graphics.

We target your audience. We produce brochures,
newsletters, magazines, reports, books, and website
contents. We write, edit, proofread, lay out, format,
illustrate, specify printing, print, and bind. We pay
attention and work quickly, at reasonable prices. Tell us
what you have, and what you want it to become.

JIR makes conventions unconventional!

Would your professional convention benefit
from some
humor? JIR can co-host a humor session, blending our
half-century trove of articles with your society's wittiest
presenters. JIR's session was a huge hit at FASEB.

All we need are expenses from San Francisco*,
and a
sales booth. We will consider any proposal or relationship
that seems good for us all.
*Near San Francisco, "expenses" are little more than a
parking pass.

Few Thrills Compare to Weather at its Worst

Extreme Weather

by Christopher C. Burt

We often hear that the day was the hottest, coldest, wettest, or snowiest on record. Is the climate really becoming more extreme as a result of global warming? The facts are in this book, along with bizarre weather events: heat bursts, electrified dust storms, snow rollers, pink snowstorms, luminous tornadoes, falls of fish and toads, ball lightning, and super bolts. Great gift! Revised edition, 320 pages, 110 photos, 47 maps, 66 tables and graphics, extreme weather data for >300 US cities. Soft cover. 2007. $29.95, custom-inscribed by author Chris Burt any way the customer wants, including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order.

Fresh, intriguing ideas and viewpoints, many of which apply to other sciences as well.

From the review in JRASC: "a rollicking read. It is fun! The language is down-to-earth and jargon-free. The writing style is straightforward and friendly. The book does not take itself too seriously. You will find it hard to put down because it just keeps going, like the Energizer bunny, with interesting topic after interesting topic."

183 pages, paperback, 2002. $26.95 custom-inscribed by the author any way the customer wants, including US postage. eMail or snail-mail your order.

Creation/ Evolution Satiricon

by Robert Dietz and John Holden

Witty, hard-hitting satire, delightfully illustrated with many droll cartoons. A classic book, long out-of-print. Paperback. $39.95 while the co-author’s last box of new copies lasts, including Holden’s custom-inscription any way the customer wants, and US postage. 8.5 x 11 inches, 140 pages, 1987. eMail or snail-mail your order.